At the SanaFontis Cancer Hospital, patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma can now be treated with a special immunotherapy. This new therapy was developed by Prof. Dr. Hendrick Veelken’s work group at the Freiburg University Hospital in cooperation with the biotech company Cellgenix, which is also located at Freiburg. The treatment, a vaccine, is an active, individualised immunotherapy and called idiotyped vaccine. Each patient gets his or her own personal vaccine custom-made from lymphoma tissue that is sampled by way of a biopsy and consists of a protein that is typically found only on the surface of lymphoma cells. It does not exist on the body’s healthy cells. This protein is called “idiotype”. Therapy with the idiotyped vaccine is aimed at stimulating the patient’s immune system and enabling it to specifically target and destroy tumour cells. The results obtained so far in a phase-I study on idiotyped vaccination showed that the therapy has few or no side effects. In addition, the vaccine produced a specific anti-idiotyped immune response rate of 65 % even in severely immunocompromised patients. Further studies to verify and confirm these results are already underway. And as the new vaccine is a medicinal product which according to currently applicable law does not require regulatory approval, it can be provided to patients without delay. At present, idiotyped-vaccine treatment of most types of  B-Cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma is conceivable, although there are other therapy options for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy with interferons or antibodies, and radiotherapy. Which therapy offers the best chances of a successful outcome at what stage, however, must be decided on a case-to-case basis.

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